Lecture about agile software development

On November 22nd and 25th, 2013, I gave a lecture about agile software development to a group of employees of Croatian Telecom. This lecture was part of their internal education in which they were educated about different IT and business technologies. The goal of the lecture was not to teach them specifics of agile software development but to give them some kind of an overview of agile development, to contrast it to a more traditional methods, more specifically to waterfall development model, and to compare them mutually. With that in mind, I ended up with a presentation that has the following parts:

1. Introduction and motivation
2. Why is software development hard?
3. Traditional methodologies
4. Principles of Agile software development.
5. Some specific agile software development methodologies.
6. Problems encountered when introducing agile methods.
7. Experiences gained during introduction of agile methods from some companies.
8. History of agile methods.
9. Conclusion.

The presentation is in Croatian, and available here. In case there is demand, I'll translate it to English. I plan to enhance and improve the presentation (there is lot of place to do so). If I upload newer version I'll expand this post. But also, filename will be changed (it includes date of a release). Accompanying this presentations are references I deemed the most interesting for those employes. They can be downloaded as a single ZIP file. Note that those references are in English!

I'm using some pictures from the Internet in the presentation and I hope that I didn't broke any licence or copyright agreements. The same holds for papers in ZIP file which are given for purely educational purposes. In case I didn't do right something, please notify me.

Some HTML(5) stuff...

It is no exaggeration to say that HTML5 is a hot stuff. Every now and then something cool pops up that is enabled by HTML5 and modern browsers. So, here in this post I'm going to present the links I collected during some period now. Basically, there will be more than just HTML5, but majority is definitely about HTML5.

First, I just finished watching this video. It's some basic stuff/intro to HTML5, but with a lot of interesting things. For example, definition of what is a tag and what is an element. The guy giving presentation is from Google Chrome team, so he naturally uses Chrome. What I liked very much is presentation within Web browser. I also like the idea that you see a small part of next slide. This helps a lot because you know what's coming. A also tried (I think for the first time) JavaScript console and Developer tools in Chrome, and they are very nice tools.

Let me summarize few things from HTML5 video that I remember:

• Story about how <docroot> element was invented. It was introduced prior to HTML5 to distinguish old and new types of HTML documents. In HTML5 it is substantially simplified.
• Ending tags not required, and attributes don't have to be within quotes.
• Many tags optional, like head, body, tbody.
• Story of how innerHTML element was introduced in IE and how it took almost 10 years to be implemented in Mozilla too.
• Charset definition should be placed before title, so to avoid possible cross site scripting attack via UTF-7.
• Parsing of HTML was never standardized. Part of the HTML5 specification is parser.
• There is a reference implementation, html5lib.

The guy also gave a link to his presentation. It is here. But, I suggest that you look into the source because there you'll find few more interesting things. I opened source because I was curious how this presentation is made. Of the interesting things, first, there is a timeline of Web browsers from 1990 unitl today. Very detailed, and very interesting. Second, there is a graph of Web browser layout engine usage share, from 1994 till 2006.

For end, here are links to some cool stuff that can be done using HTML/CSS/JavaScript:

• Demo of isometric and editable text.
• Icons created using only CSS!
• CSS3 buttons
• Cool notifications using CSS and jQuery.
• Hobo Lobo of Hamelin
• jQuery chart demo
• FFSlider
• Terminal client written in HTML5
• Web tool for creating animations 
• JavaScript animations & experiments